Posts by Nicole Cohen

This Saturday is the Fourth Annual Rally and March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. From the announcement:
Stop impunity around the disappearances and murders of Indigenous
women on Turtle Island! Over 500 Indigenous women have been murdered or have gone missing in Canada, most in the last 30 years. We come together in defense of our lives and to demonstrate the complicity of the state and its institutions (police, RCMP, coroners’ offices and the courts) … READ MORE

In an inspiring bit of news amid so much horror and bloodshed in Gaza, a group of brave women activists have just been arrested for staging an old-fashioned sit-in.
As part of ongoing protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, a group of Jewish women have occupied the Israeli consulate in Toronto to protest the violence and destruction that is being waged in their name.
The group- which includes social justice activist and professor Judy Rebick, filmmaker Cathy … READ MORE

UNITE HERE, a union that represents workers in the apparel, textile, hotel, and restaurant industries, has just launched a campaign against clothing chain Zara. Zara workers in a downtown Montreal store joined UNITE HERE in 2007 to fight bad working conditions at their store, including unpredictable schedules, short staffing, favouritism by bosses, and disregard for seniority.
According to UNITE HERE, however, Zara has fought back, using tactics that may have violated the Quebec labour code: four … READ MORE

The recipients of the 2008 Person’s Case Awards were announced earlier this month. The award honours people who have made “outstanding contributions” to the advancement of Canadian women and is named for the five women who, in 1929, won the right for women to be recognized as persons - The Famous Five.
The list of recipients is impressive but Shari Graydon - a longtime feminist activist and writer - wonders why the youth award was given … READ MORE

Thursday is Media Democracy Day, and events are being held all week in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where our own Anna Leventhal will be giving a talk titled “Roots of Grass: An (Incomplete) History of Alternative Media in Quebec.”
As the folks at Campaign for Democratic Media have pointed out, Media Democracy Day has taken on a new sense of urgency this year as
the major Internet Service Providers exert more control over Canadians’ online experience, and … READ MORE

I should have known better than to think I would like Iron Man. To be fair, I was expecting the bare minimum: a few hours of mindless entertainment, some cool superhero tricks and perhaps a digestible life lesson along the lines of Spiderman’s “with great power comes great responsibility.” That is something I can get behind.
But Iron Man was disappointing: two hours of macho aggression cheered on by a heavy-metal soundtrack, technological fetishism, glamourized militarism, … READ MORE

Ads plastered in subway stations and a provocative television preview (above) have alerted me to the fact that a new version of Beverly Hills 90210 is about to air. While the original show, which ran for 10 years in the 1990s, had a massive impact on television and teen culture—see, for example, the slew of academic discussion analyzing the show—I’m guessing 90210’s revival has a lot more to do with the success of recent teen … READ MORE

A few years ago I wrote a piece for This Magazine on the important role campus/community radio stations have played in the lives and activism of feminists. The piece isn’t available online, so I’ll just cut and paste my general point.
Campus/community radio has long been welcoming to women and their views, especially considering the limited access feminists have historically had to mainstream media. Campus/community radio has been an important platform for feminists to engage in … READ MORE

There has been much outrage over the Harper government’s quiet cuts to Canadian arts funding.
In the case of the PromArt program - a grant that enables artists to travel abroad to perform, show their films, or promote their books - the cuts weren’t made so quietly. Toronto band Holy Fuck received a lot of media attention, their name evoking the reactionary nature of the government’s assessment of who has been getting (arguably a small slice … READ MORE

The Save Our Net coalition and Campaign for Democratic Media are hosting an event this weekend to discuss net neutrality and to strategize ways to prevent the internet from being tightly controlled by telecommunications corps, which are trying to limit what information we can access online.
Steve Anderson, national co-ordinator of the Campaign For Democratic Media, will speak about the issues, including: how these companies have already been caught throttling or slowing internet traffic to businesses … READ MORE

Exciting news from the world of contraception today: the Toronto Star reported that the morning after pill will be available on drugstore shelves in Canada, which means it will be available to any woman who needs it, and women won’t have to request it from their pharmacist, which can often mean invasive, embarrassing, or judgmental questions, or even outright refusal.
Click here for some of this blog’s most recent thoughts on emergency contraception.
… READ MORE

On Monday, May 5, a bilingual panel discussion called “Women and Radio in Canada”/ ” Les femmes et la radio au Canada ” will be held at McGill University in Montreal, featuring a range of women from academia and the world of radio, Shameless favourite Patti Schmidt (CBC Radio 2).
The panel with explore the challenges of radio in the 21st century, the differences between working in French or English in this milieu, historical contributions of … READ MORE

Last week I got a notice from my Rogers, my internet service provider, informing me of changes they’re making to “better serve” my online needs. The big change, of course, is putting a cap on my “usage allowance,” which means they can charge me more for my internet use, depending on how much I download. Bell is also limiting the amount of content Sympatico subscribers can download.
This isn’t just a corporate ploy to get people … READ MORE

For those of you in Ottawa concerned about the state of child care in this country, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is hosting an event on Tuesday you should check out.
From the press release:
Multinational child care corporations, including Australian giant ABC
Learning, are moving into Canada. Corporate-run child care will damage
high-quality, community-based non-profit early learning and child care
-and threaten the future of a pan-Canadian system.
Learn more and find out what you can do at this … READ MORE

The Ryerson Student Lecture Series is bringing masked feminist avengers The Guerrilla Girls to Toronto on March 6!
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous women who assume the names of dead female artists, don gorilla masks, and use humour, graphics and clever campaigns to take on sexism, racism, and corruption in art, film, and culture. This will be the Girls’ first performance at a Toronto university.
Thursday, March 6
7 p.m., John Bassett Theatre at the … READ MORE

On Tuesday, Feb 12th, at 7 p.m., Kanahus Pellkey of the Native Youth Movement will be in Toronto talking about how the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver is impacting Indigenous lands, and how people are mobilizing around this issue.
From the event’s email (location of the talk and contact info below):
With the 2010 Winter Olympics scheduled to occur on unceded Coast Salish, St’at’imc and Squamish territory in two years, the spectacle surrounding them continues to wreak havoc … READ MORE

The National Inuit Youth Council, Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada, and the Ajunnginiq Centre of the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) are looking for Inuit youth between the ages of 13 and 30 who are interested in working on issues of safe sex among Inuit youth.
Inuit youth from Nunavut, Inuvialuit, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut regions are invited to attend a Pan-Arctic Sexual Health Conference in February 2008. Selected youth will participate in a workshop that teaches … READ MORE

Robert Pickton was found guilty on six counts of second-degree murder, for the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe and Marnie Frey, all of whom had disappeared from Vancouver’s downtown eastside between 1997 and 2001. He will be back in court to face 20 more first-degree murder charges.
The missing women story — and the fact that it took police so many years to act on the disappearance of dozens … READ MORE

The month of December means zillions of end-of-year best of lists. On that note, I’m working on a little project with Media Action to compile a list of our own and need your help, dear Shameless bloggers and readers. We’ve had wide-ranging discussions over the past year on the horrifying, idiotic, mean and often hilarious ways in which women have been portrayed in the media: depictions of motherhood (from Demi’s artful pose on the cover … READ MORE